In her account of China’s wartime suffering, the scholar Diana Lary has attributed these actions to a combination of “grandiloquent patriotism at the top and incompetence on the ground.” As any war unfolds, especially a long one, constraints are loosened and the wantonness of the destruction increases. World War II marked the era of total war, mass bombings of cities in the West as well as in the East, civilian slaughter on a mass scale. And yet the sheer numbers of the dead and displaced in the Sino-Japanese War suggest an imperial willingness on both sides to accept severe misfortune on the part of the faceless and replaceable masses when the misfortune is deemed necessary for the sake of the national good. After he took power, Mao used to applaud China’s cruel first emperor of more than two millennia before, even though his signal achievement, the construction of the Great Wall, not only cost innumerable lives but also failed to stop invasions of the Celestial Empire from the north. On both sides of the Sino-Japanese War, the willingness to accept and even to encourage death on a vast scale bespoke a frenzied, fanatical attachment to the national aspiration, a sense universally shared that death and destitution were always preferable to defeat. Some students of the war have attributed this cult of willing sacrifice to the experience of Japanese military academies, where many future Chinese officers studied alongside their Japanese counterparts in the waning days of the last dynasty and where they were identically imbued with the glory of dying rather than surrendering or being taken prisoner. In any event, there was a striking absence of prisoners of war. Martha Gellhorn attributed this to the ferocity of the hatred the Chinese felt for the invader. “A Chinese soldier,” she wrote, “gets one thousand national dollars for any Japanese prisoner captured alive. Despite this huge sum of money, the soldiers shoot any Japanese troops they can lay hands on, as an immediate personal vengeance for the misery of people like themselves in villages like their own homes.”
A few weeks after the outbreak of the war, The New York Times interviewed Japanese army and navy spokesmen in Shanghai on the complete absence of captured enemy soldiers in a conflict that by then had already involved hundreds of thousands of troops. The army spokesman readily acknowledged that “ ‘almost no Chinese war prisoners have been taken’ and smiled broadly when told of the Chinese claim that one Japanese soldier had been imprisoned.”
China’s vast size and population have led other rulers besides Chiang to sacrifice vast numbers for the sake of the national purpose, or to see large numbers of dead as an inescapable element of the national experience. The Taiping Rebellion, in which twenty million people were killed, was by far the world’s costliest conflict in the nineteenth century, though the American Civil War was a worthy rival for that distinction. Later, after the Communist takeover, Mao used to boast that a nuclear attack on China would cost it much less than a similar attack on other countries because China could afford to lose tens of millions of its people and still be the most populous country on the planet. Mao accepted without any apparent remorse the death of more than forty million people in the famine of 1959–1962, which was a direct result of his economic policies. He was willing to endure the loss of thousands of China’s intellectuals, scientists, writers, artists, and technicians in the campaigns for political purity that he waged throughout his time in power. There were always enough people in China for a fresh start. The population was fungible.
There was something of that in Chiang as well, as the Yellow River flood indicated. After appeasing Japan for years on the grounds that his armies were too weak to offer effective resistance, Chiang took on the anti-Japanese fight as a great national purpose for which no sacrifice and no amount of suffering was too great. In the battle for Shanghai, because of furious Japanese bombing of the Chinese part of the city, the population of the International Settlement and French Concession, which were exempt from attack, rose from 1.5 to 4 million. “Tens of thousands of homeless clogged the streets and hundreds of thousands more slept in office corridors, stockrooms, temples, guild halls, amusement parks, and warehouses,” the historian Frederic Wakeman has written. “By the end of the year 101,000 corpses had been picked up in the streets or ruins.” The Chapei district, the city’s largest Chinese residential area, was, as another historian has put it, “the epicenter of devastation.” A French journalist arriving in Wusong, a city north of Shanghai, wrote that “the entire town and the villages all round it had been horribly destroyed, burned, and razed to the ground by the bombing.” In Wuxi, seventy miles to the northwest, the population dropped from 300,000 to 100,000. The county seat of Jiading, west of Shanghai, was inspected by Kumagai Yasushi, a Japanese officer in charge of what was called pacification for the South Manchurian Railway. “What an awful scene of desolation it was,” he wrote later.
Houses had collapsed, roof tiles were scattered over the roads, and snapped electrical wires were strewn about, making it hard just to walk. Here and there were holes probably caused by bombs dropped from airplanes. Oddly enough, the towering pagoda standing in the centre of town was the only thing to survive unscathed. Not a soul was to be seen. All we saw occasionally was a doddering elderly person crawl out from one of the collapsed hovels and then go back in again. A third of the houses within the city wall had sadly been destroyed. We found ourselves in a city of death, a mysteriously silent world in which the only sound was the tap of our own footsteps.
To resist the Japanese attack on Shanghai, Chiang ordered whole divisions to stand and fight, even though it meant that they would be wiped out, rather than withdraw them so they could survive to fight again. The resulting losses were ruinous and unrecoverable. The estimates of Chinese military casualties ranged from a low of 187,000 to a high of 300,000, with the main losses suffered by Chiang’s best German-trained and -equipped divisions—a catastrophe that would directly affect China’s military effectiveness for the rest of the war. To western eyes, this sacrifice was senseless from the military point of view, even though, as Theodore White put it, “in a political sense it was one of the great demonstrations of the war,” proving as it did “how much suffering and heroism the Chinese people could display in the face of hopeless odds.”
There were two main periods of intense fighting during the war, the first in 1937 and 1938 when, following the Marco Polo Bridge Incident, Japan executed its two-pronged full-scale assault on China. One prong was aimed at seizing the provinces north of the Yellow River and incorporating them with Manchuria into a Japanese-controlled North China that would have been larger than Western Europe. The second prong aimed at the rich Yangzi River Valley. Both assaults involved the merciless firebombings of civilian concentrations, from Shanghai on the coast to Guilin in the southwest. Along the way looting, mass killings, and rape were common, as the Japanese pursued a policy aimed at terrorizing the population into submission and forcing the government to surrender. What has come to be called “the rape of Nanjing,” in which some three hundred thousand Chinese civilians were killed and innumerable women and girls raped, was one of the most notorious atrocities of World War II. As a result of the desecration of Nanjing, some 80 percent of the population was gone, either through death or escape. Seventy-eight percent of the Chinese population that remained in the massacred city had no income, and, in most cases, no possessions, not even bedding.
The rape of Nanjing was hardly the only atrocity in China, where, as we’ve seen from the example of Changsha, many cities and villages were left in ruins, virtually without inhabitants. Yanwo was a town on the slope of a hill about thirty miles southwest of Xuzhou, a railway junction in Jiangsu province north of Shanghai. On May 20, 1938, Japanese troops charged into the town and, within an hour, had killed two hundred people on the streets. “Then they herded 670 men, both locals and refugees, into the courtyard of a house just outside the village,” one historian has written. “The buildings around the courtyard were set on fire from outside; men who tried to escape the flames were gunned down by soldiers surrounding the house. All but five of the 670 were killed.” In
weeks of fighting in the northern railway junction of Taierzhuang, the population of twenty thousand was reduced to seven people, an eighty-five-year-old man and six women, the North China Herald reported.
Most places, of course, did not suffer that kind of total devastation, but many places experienced a ongoing, almost routine kind of damage. Gellhorn arrived by air in Kunming one night in January 1941 after twenty-seven Japanese bombers had hit the city during the day. One street on which virtually every house had been struck was
packed solid with Chinese: men wearing black or faded blue cotton clothes, a few women hobbling along on bound five-inch feet, peasant women in black pants and coats, with their hair in braids down their backs, children caught in the undertow.… Gas mains had been hit, and cesspools, and underfoot the street sloshed in water from broken pipes. The miserable houses, suddenly cracked open, let out all their long store of dirt and smell. There was no air to breathe, and any time now these houses sagging sideways on unsteady beams, or balanced against one firm wall, might slip down into the crowded street like an avalanche.… All along the side of the street, by candlelight and the light of kerosene lanterns, the people were digging their way back into their bombed and ruined homes and hammering together torn boards to make some kind of roof and some kind of wall, some kind of shelter to live in. There was only the night to work. Tomorrow the Japanese would come back.
When air raid warnings sounded during the day, Gellhorn noted, people just left, because there were no bomb shelters in the city and no protection in the buildings. “They take to the hills and watch the Japanese bombers working over their empty city.”
When the Chinese didn’t fulfill the prediction of the Japanese commanders that they would quickly surrender, Japan found itself in the kind of quagmire that later became familiar to the United States in Korea and Vietnam, locked into a conflict that couldn’t be decisively won but from which it seemed impossible to withdraw. By the end of 1938, after a year and a half of warfare on a vast scale, the Japanese gave up on the idea of a quick victory, or, indeed, on a purely military victory at all. Rather than seek the annihilation of the KMT, they tried to make the Chinese government irrelevant by building up an alternative. They found a compliant former leader of the left wing of the Kuomintang named Wang Jingwei (a name that has lived in universal infamy in China ever since) to head a puppet government installed in Nanjing.
Meanwhile, Chiang Kai-shek moved the government inland beyond the forbidding gorges of the Yangzi River to Chungking, formerly a sleepy, backward city of cliffs and hills. A long period of stalemate ensued, though it was a very sanguinary stalemate. One historian of the period has determined that in the year and a half before December 1942, casualties were nearly 50,000 per month, which are 10,000 fewer than those incurred between the battle of Shanghai and the fall of Wuhan in 1937. According to the Nationalists, there were nine major and 496 minor battles in this period, as well as more than 20,000 smaller clashes.
The year 1940 was an especially bad one. In the winter of 1939, the Nationalists had attempted a general counteroffensive with as many as eighty divisions involved in a nationwide series of attacks. While this took place, the Communists expanded the areas under their control and recruited new troops, both at the cost of KMT strength. But Chiang’s troops, to his bitter disappointment, performed badly, their commanders frequently refusing to follow orders to go on the offensive, instead settling down into a treasonous sort of modus vivendi, more often trading with the enemy than fighting it.
From the failure of the winter offensive of 1940 to the recapture of the Burma Road at the beginning of 1945, the KMT never attempted another major offensive. Instead it reverted to Chiang’s preferred “defense in depth,” hoping that the enemy would exhaust itself through overextension until, finally, a counterattack was feasible. Meanwhile, in 1940, the Japanese advancing down the coast of China toward Vietnam took Guangxi province, tying down more Chinese troops and causing numerous casualties. There were political setbacks as well as military ones. Previously, when the Soviet Union signed its notorious non-aggression pact with the Axis, it freed Japanese troops in Manchuria and Inner Mongolia to concentrate on China. In July 1940, the British, submitting to a Japanese demand, stopped supplies from coming to China through either Hong Kong or Burma. The French, now under the collaborationist Vichy regime, allowed a Japanese military mission to Hanoi. The bridges on the Hanoi-to-Yunnan railroad were destroyed. Even before Japan’s actual seizure of Burma, the blockade was virtually complete.
The situation, in other words, a full year before the entry of the United States into the war, was calamitous. By 1940, the Japanese had 1,000 first-line aircraft in China, compared to about 150 second-rate planes for China, which lost both its main flying school and aircraft factory in the conquest by Japan of Hangzhou and Nanchang. All Chinese planes defending Chungking were destroyed months after the Nationalists moved the capital there, and cities including Chengdu, Xian, Changsha, and even Lanzhou, at the gates of Central Asia, were subjected to frequent air assaults. Between May and September 1940, during the supposed stalemate, the Japanese flew 5,000 sorties and dropped 27,000 bombs on Chinese population centers, this despite often effective harassment by Chennault’s Flying Tigers. Finally, the Japanese seized the Yangzi River port of Yichang, the gateway to Sichuan province, and a junction for railroad lines going further west. This gave the Japanese a base for its bombing campaigns as well as control of the rice-basket territory of Hubei province.
Though the absolute number of Japanese troops in occupied China seems high, they were actually spread thin in so vast a territory. Japanese policy was to control strategic points, especially along China’s railroads, and to set up local administrations by inducing local Chinese to collaborate with them. This made them susceptible to enemy infiltration, resistance, and guerrilla action, in central and south China, by armed bands under Nationalist control and more famously in the north by forces belonging to the Communist Eighth Route and Fourth Route armies. Years after the war, Japanese veterans testified that starting in 1942, in an attempt to cope with this difficult situation, Japan carried out what came in China to be termed the “Three Alls” policy—kill all, burn all, loot all—which meant savage reprisals against villages for harboring guerrillas and against any individuals suspected of opposing Japanese rule. Japanese scholars have estimated that 2.7 million Chinese were killed as a result of that policy. Herbert Bix, Emperor Hirohito’s most recognized American biographer, concludes that the atrocities carried out as a result of the Three Alls policy were “incomparably more destructive and of far longer duration than either the army’s chemical and biological warfare or the ‘rape of Nanking’ ” in 1938.
Life was deformed in numerous ways by the war, twisted into strange, unrecognizable shapes, as the Chinese people, like people in occupied Europe, coped in their numerous, various ways. Some became collaborators, or were able to exploit the situation to their economic advantage. Others became martyrs. Thousands of youths from urban areas were drawn to the Communists’ headquarters at Yenan, believing that to be the center of real patriotic activity. Millions fled their homes and remained refugees for years. The withdrawal of the central government from big cities like Shanghai left a vacuum to be filled by secret societies, criminal gangs, and black-marketers. “There was nothing they would not do and no evil they would not commit,” a Shanghai resident wrote to what was left of the municipal government, “with the result that good people vanished without a trace and bandits arose in great number, committing murders and rapes every day.”
“During the resistance,” a Shanghai doctor named Chen Cunren wrote in a memoir, “those who suffered suffered all the more; those who were enriched made their fortunes in strange and inexplicable ways.” The interactions of collaborationists, patriots, and the vast majority simply trying to survive created pungent tales of helplessness, exploitation, and revenge. In Hong Kong, seized from British control by Japan in 1941, a Chinese policeman n
amed Tse, a squat, fat man who had expropriated the house of an Englishman languishing in an enemy detention camp, formed a partnership with a Japanese gendarme named Nakajima. They arrested Hong Kong Chinese on trumped-up charges and released them on payment of ransom by their families. Naturally, Tse was a feared man in Hong Kong. In one incident, a man of mixed Portuguese-Chinese background, Dominic Alves, disappeared into a private jail maintained by Tse in Kowloon, possibly because Dominic had once bested Tse in a real estate deal. But this story had a fairly happy ending. Dominic’s Chinese-Portuguese wife, Miriam, went to the Japanese authorities in Kowloon, where she filed a complaint against both Tse and Nakajima. She was supported by a Japanese colonial official who actually took seriously Japan’s claim to have invaded and occupied most of the rest of Asia to liberate the continent from western imperialism and bring about better lives for its people. Miriam’s effort brought both a reward and punishment. She was given eight lashes for her temerity in going to the Kowloon gendarmerie. But her husband was released and Tse disappeared.
In some areas that had been the scenes of vicious early fighting but had long been part of the puppet state set up by Japan in 1938, a kind of collaborationist decadence coexisted with extreme poverty and desperation. The historian Frederic Wakeman describes a fancy mansion on the Rue Dupleix in the French Concession of Shanghai “frequented by movie starlets, opera divas, and café society social butterflies” whose cars could be seen parked on the roadway outside. The place was owned by one Pan Sanxing, who had a monopoly on passenger steamers plying the Yangzi River from Shanghai to Hankou about two hundred miles to the west. He maintained Chinese, Japanese, and western kitchens, and the best of Shanghai’s prostitutes “ready to be fondled by Japanese officers tipsy after two or three drinks of expensive foreign liquor and looking forward to opium-drugged orgies in the tatami-floor rooms … where they were free to stay until dawn.” This “collaborationist highlife” included a creative entrepreneurship that exploited shortages and desperation. Dr. Chen writes about a black market in antibiotics, a dose of which could cost as much as a villa, operated by underground gangs that sent runners to Indochina to collect them. Among the best-known of Shanghai’s doctors was Ding Huikang, a specialist in tuberculosis who found a clever and profitable way to overcome a shortage of the x-ray film normally used to diagnose the disease. Ding used just one machine, without film. A patient would stand in front of it for a minute while a technician examined the live reflection. The technician would stamp an impression of the patient’s lung on his palm with a red circle designating where he thought he had seen a tubercular spot. Then Dr. Ding used a long, thick needle to inject air into the infected spot. He also employed antibiotics for those wealthy patients who could afford them. Ding used the fortune he made during the war to buy rare Chinese antiques and entice women, especially actresses.
China 1945 Page 9
